(8)Ryu Hayabusa vs (9)Simon Belmont 2018
Ulti's Analysis This match may look like it was a barn burner due to the final percentages and score, but it wasn't really a classic/great match. You know the phrase in sports "not as close as the final score"? That was this match. Simon Belmont took the early lead, and outside of a few speed bumps in the first hour, he was able to very consistently hold things at 52-53%. Ryu was able to cut the peak lead of 750 down to 450 or so, but it was never at a winning comeback pace. We've seen Ryu in some weird matches in the past where he pulls off some astonishing feats, and I sort of include this match on that list, but he was a victim of two things. One was the 8pm poll start time killing our trends. I honestly think Ryu could have won this match had it started at midnight. Look at how well Ryu did after 2am. Shift this entire poll 4 hours and he may very well have won the day vote to win. I know that makes no sense, but we see weird things happen as polls get closer. The other thing Ryu was a victim of is pretty obvious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8oCbGaAZTo Just for fun, if you plug 2010 values into the stat calculator, you get Ryu winning this match with 55%. If you plug in 2013 numbers, you get 62%. If you plug in 2004 Ryu against 2002 Simon, you get 61%. And if you plug in 2007's numbers, you get a typical LOL x stats result of 75%. We can toss that one out as an outlier and just use the mean of the other 3, which is 59%. Is a simple announcement of being in Smash Bros worth 10% in a GameFAQs contest? Nothing else happened that would have affected either character, and without Smash Ryu clearly wins this match. With it, Simon flips things 10%. If you use the lowest possible number, it's like a 6% flip. Any time someone tries denying Smash's influence on our site, just show them this PCA. Couldn't be more obvious. And because I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFMQ_wM80_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVRJktHHiTM Lightning_Strikes's Analysis What happened?: Put simply, Super Smash Bros., but more on that in the next section. Ryu H is hard to pin down in terms of exact strength but is at least pretty good, and has a huge pic factor bonus. Simon has been fodder line at absolute best. In any other contest this would have been open and shut. Masahiro Sakurai had other ideas however, and Simon's announcement for Smash made this a tough one. Simon got off to an early lead which he never actually gave up. The match never got further than around 700 votes and it hit that early, at about five hours in. After that it was a slow match of attrition, with Simon only winning by 467 votes. What could this mean?: This match was undeniably flipped by Smash. Without that great trailer giving Simon more relevance than he has had since 1991, This was coupled with the best design he's ever had, which was nicely featured in his match pic. Ryu H is probably a bit weaker than usual, as nobody cares about Ninja Gaiden anymore. I want to get The Messenger (from a great game nobody here has played) in here to see just how much being a cool ninja in match pics actually helps. Safer777's Analysis This match had the whole Crew picking Ruy. And almost everyone on the board picked Ruy. So Simon won of course. Wait what? Seriously though this was a huge surprise. Ruy isn't that strong or anything but look at him. Pure ninja! And he does have some wins. As for Simon he has taken part in 5 contests and he finally scored a win. So why that happened? You are not going to believe it. Simon is in Smash! Yeah what else could boost him? Ruy has appeared in some Warriors games but we don't care about there here. As for the match. A really close one which is good. Simon was winning for a lot of hours and suddenly Ruy was coming back. He kept winning updates and it looked that he could do it. Then Simon started stalling. We are talking about Simon winning updates with like 2 votes. So Ruy eventually couldn't do it. Still awesome match. Also the prediction percentage was good for Simon and that surprised me. I thought almost everyone would pick Ryu here. I wonder why most picked Simon? Tsunami's Analysis Oh hey a close match! This was the match where people really started talking about the Smash boost, even though Ryu Hayabusa had no real reason to hold on to any of his past strength. Still, it's no surprise that this tripped up a number of people. Ryu Hayabusa is remembered for the two-day clash with Jill in 2004 and the upset of Master Chief in 2010. He had a reputation for being clutch. Simon Belmont... first managed to finish ahead of someone in a contest match when he came in second place in 2013, behind Gordon Freeman and ahead of Hades. In 2007, he finished comfortably in 4th place behind Sam Fisher, a character whose only win was against GFNW-era Gordon. But that doesn't even do justice to how awful Simon was in 2007, because the second-place character in that match was Raiden. Yes, pre-MGS4 Raiden isn't exactly strong, but how is Sam Fisher not horribly weak in the same poll as the protagonist of a Metal Gear Solid game? I first arrived to the board in 2009, so my first Character Battle was 2010, and I picked Simon to beat a newcomer because old characters > new characters. That was the match that Ezio won in order to get to that 2010 Round 2 match with Zelda. Unlike then, I was in good company here, at least on the board. Nearly three quarters of Gurus got this wrong. The casuals got this right, though only at a 57.94% rate, so it's pretty clear that our knowledge of the past was what ruined us here. And this was a close match. Most Oracles called it to be close, but not this close, so I got a pretty good position in Oracle despite having the wrong winner because I was one of only two Ryu H pickers to go under 51%. Oracle actually had a worse prediction percentage than Guru, 13 for and 61 against. Except...it wasn't ever really in doubt. Simon got off to a triple-digit lead in 10 minutes, 200+ an hour later, 300+ by the end of the second hour, and 500 less than an hour after crossing 300. To be specific, Simon's lead at 10:25 PM--just 2 hours 25 minutes in--was identical to his final margin of victory of 467, and a grand total of one update in between those saw Ryu Hayabusa get even a few votes closer than that. Maybe Hayabusa would've been better off with another 48-hour match. Oh, right, and this was another one where the registered and unregistered voters favored different characters, but the result remained the same. The registered voters were the ones that favored Simon. Category:2018 Contest Matches